Occult Botany

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

considerations: disciplines and the incoherence of Newton’s natural philosophy

Hans Sloane tells of 'a Negro' who healed him of a 'chego' in his toe while he was a doctor in Jamaica. She was 'famous for her ability in such cases', yet Sloane finally concludes that 'Blacks … are a very perverse Generation of People'.1 Thus the Secretary of the Royal Society in 1707 provides a glimpse of a different kind of science that might have developed if non-Europeans and European women had been credited as producers of scientific knowledge.2 According to feminist historians of science, a number of women practiced healing and wrote works on natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England, but these possibilities began to diminish. Londa Schiebinger argues that natural philosophy was more open to European women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than in later periods, and she traces the process by which women were marginalized as science emerged as an institution. Lynette Hunter, Sarah Hutton, and Patricia Fara have redefined the history of the 'scientific revolution' beyond a list of 'great men' or 'great women' to include domestic knowledge, technical know-how, medicine, midwifery, and family networks where natural philosophy was central. Ruth Watts contends that, whereas many women did participate in scientific activity and the networks associated with it, there was an increasing emphasis on the masculinity of natural philosophy, and its practice at exclusively masculine locations. In her book on Cartesian Women, Erica Harth argues that several seventeenth-century women interested in Descartes's theories wrote before the new norms of objectivity became universalized, and transformed women from observers into objects of study.3

In the early eighteenth century, the Sicilian volcano Etna was still primarily familiar to European culture through its many classical associations. This chapter examines the interaction between classical accounts of Etna and other, developing genres of describing and representing that mountain in the writings of some famous eighteenth-century travelers and ‘natural philosophers’. In paving the way for the modern science of volcanology, such writers both retain and depart from the tropes of classical writing about Etna, and, in so doing, enable new figurative appropriations of the volcano and volcanic processes in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English poetry. As an example of such classically-derived appropriations, the chapter concludes with an examination of the use of volcanism as a figure for industry in the Botanic Garden of Erasmus Darwin and in the poems written about the new ironworks at Coalbrookdale, by Darwin’s friend and contemporary, Anna Seward. (Less)

So Abraham Cowley, in his ode ‘To the Royal Society’, romantically figures Francis Bacon’s reformation of natural philosophy as the overthrow of the tyranny of scholastic learning. During the seventeenth century, the authority of the ancients had been challenged by new experimental and empirical methodologies far removed from the ‘Magick’ in Cowley’s paradoxical metaphor. Despite the ode’s claims, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the new natural philosophy had not yet established supremacy: many rival narratives of nature competed for cultural acceptance. This book examines the ways in which Jonathan Swift, writing at this time of great transition, engaged with developments in knowledge of the external observable world, and with the culture of scientific discovery and practice, including the textual transmission of ideas. More particularly, the study focuses upon the theological, political and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considers what they tell us about Swift’s literary strategies and the growth of his often satiric imagination.

The<i>Gazette</i>, the<i>Tatler</i>, and the Making of the Periodical Essay: Form and Genre in Eighteenth-Century News

Editorial.

The recipes included in Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) appear to be some of the most jarring and out-of-context inclusions in the narrative. This article explores the relationship between Barker’s novel and the form of the recipe collection in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on both a material and an epistemological level. The entanglements between recipes and the patchwork screen not only point to the processes of constructing and conveying knowledge, but also to the materiality of these processes as Galesia and the Lady build the patchwork screen. Her focus on the materiality of knowledge reinforces Jane Barker’s deep engagement with natural philosophy, the natural world around her, as well as domestic practices when the characters sew literal pieces of paper with poems on cookery and natural philosophy into the patchwork screen. The material and structural influence of the recipe on Barker’s narrative constitutes an additional layer underneath the reigning metaphor of the patchwork screen and textiles in more general. Considering the recipe and recipe collections as underlying metaphors in addition to the patchwork increases the generically experimental character of the Patch-Work Screen.

Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum, and the Pensées

In 1724 Robert Steuart, professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, founded a class library. An early catalogue has survived, entitled The Physiological Library. Begun by Mr. Steuart, and some of the students of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, April 2. 17z4: and augmented by some gentlemen; and che students of natural philosophy, December 1724. This was printed in 1725, by which time there were 149 members, or “Benefactors”—150 if we include Steuart himself. The catalogue provides a list of members, dividing them into three categories. Forty-nine natural philosophy students appear in the first category (p. 5); thirty-eight gentlemen in the second (pp. 6-7), plus five more who joined later and whose names are included at the end (p. 62). A further fifty-seven natural philosophy students who joined the Library in December are listed in the third category, and here the name ‘David Hume’ appears.

This volume deals with corpuscular matter theory that was to emerge as the dominant model in the seventeenth century. By retracing atomist and corpuscularian ideas to a variety of mutually independent medieval and Renaissance sources in natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy, mathematics, and theology, this volume shows the debt of early modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby explains its bewildering heterogeneity. The book assembles nineteen carefully selected contributions by some of the most notable historians of medieval and early modern philosophy and science. All chapters present new research results and will therefore be of interest to historians of philosophy, science, and medicine between 1150 and 1750.

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

This chapter reviews the book Disciplinas, Saberes y Prácticas. Filosofia Natural, Matemáticas y Astronomía en la Sociedad Española de la Época Moderna (2014), by Víctor Navarro Brotóns. The book offers a fresh and comprehensive view on the practice of science and natural philosophy in early modern Spain. It is organised in three parts: The sixteenth century and early seventeenth century: the scientific Renaissance; The seventeenth century and early eighteenth century: scientific activity during the Scientific Revolution; and The eighteenth century (up to 1767). Underlying this organisation is the fundamental view that science and scientific activities flourished in Spain particularly during the sixteenth century, entered a period of relative ‘decline’ as the seventeenth century progressed, and experienced a revival in the eighteenth century.

Ladies of Ill-Repute: The South Sea Bubble, The Caribbean, and The Jamaica Lady MELISSA K. DOWNES England's power in the early eighteenth century depended heavily on its imperialist adventures, and particularly upon a series of islands—the Caribbean. The Caribbean was of central economic importance to England in the eighteenth century, particularly in its reliance on slaves and its production of sugar.1 Indeed, various historians argue the important role of the Caribbean in developing English commercial power. For example, historian W.T. Selley remarks, "The West Indies occupied a place of supreme importance in the first British Empire." He notes their strategic value during the great conflicts of the century where "the possession of the Islands was constantly at stake in these struggles." The islands functioned as naval bases and strengthened England's maritime growth and power, both commercially and in terms of military capability. The Caribbean also served as a source of tropical goods for England and functioned as a place for exporting English goods. By the end of the century, the West Indies accounted for about a quarter of all British import and export trade, a very high proportion.2 In terms of export, import, taxation, maritime growth, British industries and manufacture, and the slave trade, the Caribbean was essential to the British economy (and culture). I would argue the centrality of the Caribbean to both the English culture and 23 24 / DOWNES economy, in part because the two—economy and culture—are so entangled within the early eighteenth century. I would suggest further that the Caribbean plays a significant part in the developing discourses of imperialism, trade, Englishness, and the South Sea Bubble. The Bubble was the economic scandal of the British early eighteenth century, and around it much of the anxiety over luxury, credit, empire, sexuality and women coalesced. The majority of early eighteenth-century British writers, both the canonical and the Grub Street variety, were taken up with the convulsions of a more fully urbanized and commercialized England. Not only did human anxiety about the tumult of the time insist upon comment, but the literary market insisted that, for a writer to be published, those comments must be made. Topical events were the frequent subject of both celebration and satiric attack, and the South Sea Bubble was the central event. The South Sea Company was established to alleviate the national debt crisis and, simultaneously, to cash in on the immense wealth and trading possibilities of Spanish possessions in the Americas. The Company was set up to counter and compete with the "whiggish Bank of England and East India Company."3 But corruption soon set in. The stocks rose to extreme heights before the Bubble burst. When it did, "the fire of London or the plague ruined not the number of people that are now undone."4 There were devastating bankruptcies, mass panic, and a general outcry to hang the directors. The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to bring the Caribbean, trade, and the institution of slavery back into discussions of the South Sea Bubble and, second, to read The Battle of the Bubbles and The Jamaica Lady as Bubble texts within that context of trade, slavery, and the Caribbean. I am suggesting that representations of the Caribbean in early eighteenthcentury literature enter into the anxieties about the domestic market and the changing economic identity of England, with particular reference here to the moment of greatest anxiety, the South Sea Bubble. To discuss narratives surrounding the scandal of the South Sea Bubble is, judging by surface appearance, to enter a realm far away from the Caribbean. The South Seas appear to have nothing to do geographically with the Caribbean. We have come to think of the South Seas as Pacific space. However, modern understanding of the South Seas differs somewhat from early eighteenth-century discourse. As John Carswell notes: The £9 million worth of unfunded government securities were to be exchanged compulsorily for shares at par in a joint Ladies of Ill-Repute / 25 stock company to be set up under the Act to carry on "the sole trade and traffic, from August 1, 1711, into unto and from the Kingdoms...

The chapter examines Herman Boerhaave’s (1668–1738) influential account of fire and heat, expounded in his 1732 Elementa chemiae, in light of the changing relations between chemistry and natural philosophy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Going back to the 1660s and to Robert Boyle’s critique of chemical analysis and the nature of elements, the chapter explores the tensions and challenges inherent in Boerhaave’s view of elements and instruments—fire was both—as well as his ideas about menstruums and solution chemistry. Particular attention is paid to his consideration of fire as an imponderable agent of material change against the backdrop of mechanistic and materialistic trends in matter theory. The contributions of two chemists and members of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, Samuel Duclos (1598–1685) and Wilhelm Homberg (1652–1715), who developed theoretical and experimental programs employing burning lenses and mirrors, are evaluated as part of the story. These contextual reconstructionsillustrate the dynamics of change among diverging notions of elements, instruments, analysis, composition, and material change more generally, as these entities and categories straddled the shifting perimeters of the physical–chemical divide around the turn of the eighteenth century.